Boggart Snape (was:Re: Snape Wars vs Ship Wars...)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 144713

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
<horridporrid03 at y...> wrote:

> And that could be tying things together a bit too tightly, yes.  I 
> suppose it depends on how much care JKR has given to Neville's 
> story.  Because if Snape does turn out to be ESE or OFH, if it 
> turns out he really *was* a danger to Neville, rather than a 
> schoolboy fear, Neville didn't triumph in the boggart scene, he 
> became dangerously and wrongly overconfident.

I think it is tying things together too tightly, because it's 
demanding that things always be context-appropriate (for your own 
definition of appropriate) retroactively.  What's written with 
Neville and the Boggart works at that point in time for Neville, and 
it's a valuable lesson for him.  But we've already gotten something 
that would make us read this over again with a different perspective, 
given the Snape as DE thing.  We can add yet *another* layer onto it 
with Snape as the informer of the Prophecy, setting in motion the 
chain of events which practically orphans Neville.

It's already quite a bit less funny for me, at least, to realize that 
Neville is terrified of the teacher who did play a role--intentional 
or not--in his sorrows.  And what if the scene can also be looked 
back upon as naive and with even more sinister undertones?  Does that 
make it a bad scene, then?  I don't see how this would distort 
Neville's story.

Even if Snape is ultimately DDM, there's something very scary about 
anyone who can summon the magic to will another human being dead.

-Nora shivers and freezes and hunts for the heat knob